Biography

From 1939, Davidson was a reporter for the London "Economist" in Paris, France. From December 1939, he
was a Secret Intelligence Service (SIS)/MI-6 D Section
(sabotage) officer sent to Budapest (see Special Operations Europe,
chapter 3) to establish a news service as cover.In April
1941, with the Nazi invasion, he fled to Belgrade, Yugoslavia. In May, he was captured by
Italian forces and was later released as part of a prisoner
exchange. From late 1942 to mid-1943, he was chief of the Special Operations Executive
(SOE) Yugoslav Section in Cairo, Egypt, where he was James Klugmann's supervisor. From January 1945 he
was liaison officer with partisans in Liguria, Italy.

Since 1951, he became a well known authority on African history, an
unfashionable subject in the 1950s. His writings have emphasised
the pre-colonial achievements of Africans, the disastrous effects
of the Atlantic Slave Trade, the further damage inflicted on Africa
by European colonialism and the baleful effects of the Nation State
in Africa.

Davidson's works are required reading in many British universities.
He is globally recognized as an expert on African History.

He currently lives in Staffordshire.

Awards

Davidson's book "The Lost Cities of Africa" won him the 1960
Anisfield-Wolf Award, for the best book that dealt with racial
problems in creative literature. His work on African history won
the 1970 Gold Medal from Haile
Selassie. In 1976, he won the Medalha
Amilcar Cabral. He received honorary degrees from the
Open
University of Great
Britain in 1980, and the University of Edinburgh in
1981. For his film series "Africa," he won the Gold Award, from the
International Film and Television Festival of New York in 1984. He
has won various other awards.